Dark Forest Mauseleum

This ended up the result of just doodling to see what I could come up with for ecosystem painting within Vue, but it grew to have a life of its own once I started adding the dead trees. In the end, I started thinking of Indiana Jones-style ruins in the middle of jungles, and so came the mauseleum.

Once that was in place, it obviously had to have a night sky atmosphere added, this one with global radiosity in it, but it also had some basic lights brought in closer to the mauseleum. A light behind the building with softness and volumetric turned on gave it the strange light-beams effect coming from inside the dome area.

When I brought the resulting image into Photoshop for postwork, it really had some problems with the definition, the lights had almost washed out a lot of the mauseleum itself, so I used the alpha mask I’d created for the building on its own to remove the surrounding terrain from a copy of the background layer, and made that layer overlay at about 40%. That brought the building nicely into darker focus.

All in all, a fun doodle.

Rendered in Vue, postwork in Photoshop. Total time to setup including hand-painting the forest ecosystem, 3 hours. Total render time, 2 hours. Postwork time, 30 minutes.